Tag: manchester

Thrilled to share the cover art and preorder information for my next book, ‘Crook’s Hollow’, coming from Black Rose Writing on 22nd March 2018.

BLURB:

“In the quiet village of Crook’s Hollow, almost exactly between Manchester and Liverpool, land and pride are king.

And now someone has just tried to kill Thor Loxley – but Thor has no clue as to why. As the estranged youngest of the omnipresent Loxley farming dynasty, all of whom view him as a traitorous turncoat, in a village where everybody knows everybody else’s business, life is hard enough. But here, farmers do things the old way. You deal with problems on your own terms. You keep everything in house where possible. You avoid involving the authorities. With nobody to turn to, Thor sets out to uncover who wronged him.

But with corrupt land developers circling, the rival Crook family seeking to unsettle the Loxley’s at every turn, his own family despising him, and jealous old acquaintances lurking, the mystery plunges ever deeper – and up floats more greed, betrayal, secrecy and blood than Thor could possibly imagine.”

EARLY PRAISE FOR ‘CROOK’S HOLLOW’:

“Robert Parker’s stunning second book is a fast-paced and tense thriller set in rural northern England. Opening with an attempted murder, it is a roller coaster of a read with a gripping plot that will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last page. Parker just gets better and better.” Danielle Ramsay, The Last Cut, the DI Brady series

“In Crook’s Hollow, Robert Parker exposes the dark side of a sleepy English village. Gritty and intense, Crook’s Hollow is an edgy mystery full of damning secrets and family reckonings, all written in Parker’s captivating, true-to-life style that is sure to keep readers turning the page, hungry for more.” Steph Post, A Tree Born Crooked, Lightwood, Walk In The Fire

“A pacey read that keeps you guessing until the end.” Torquil MacLeod, the Malmö Mysteries

“a visceral, taut, country noir set in the badlands west of Manchester, Crook’s Hollow is a great new novel from Robert Parker. If you liked Catch Me Daddy or the Red Riding Quartet check this out.” Edgar, Ned Kelly & Barry Award Winner Adrian McKinty, Rain Dogs

“A breakneck thriller slowed only by its subtle and masterful turns. Robert Parker’s CROOK’S HOLLOW is a book to be relished and read again.” David Joy, The Weight Of This World

It’s with great delight that I can share the news that A Wanted Man, my debut novel, has been published by Endeavour Press. You can grab it here!

A Wanted Man is, simply put, the story of a soldier who was discarded, but still has more to give. I kept asking myself what it would feel like to give everything for your country, only to come back to find everything was different – including yourself. What would happen if you only have training for things that are of no use at all in regular civilian life? What do you do when you’ve grown up while fighting wars abroad, only for the fighting to end and you’re not needed anymore? When I posed these questions to myself, the character of Ben Bracken began to form in my answers.

When I was 17, I wrote a screenplay that was about a criminal gang in Manchester, UK, near where I still live today. It was profoundly formulaic, and followed similar tropes seen in countless movies over the years. I loved a good crime yarn, and wanted to write one – that was my simple motivation. But as I got older, I mulled over this screenplay time and time again, realising that something was missing. It was only when my own friends and acquaintances started to come back from Afghanistan, and I spoke with them about their experiences, did the penny drop. Their collective states, each varied, inspired me hugely, both in terms of my admiration for them, and creatively as well.

And then I thought about dropping an ex-soldier into that old crime screenplay I’d written. The possibilities suddenly seemed endless, and I was away. The creative process organically seemed to turn the project into a novel, as I started from fresh. Before long I was flying and in 8 weeks, I’d written the first draft.

That was late 2013, and since then I have grown immeasurably, both personally and in terms of my writing, and it’s with immense pride that A Wanted Man finds readers today. I really hope you enjoy it. I had a blast writing it, and there’s plenty more to come from Ben Bracken, mark my words.

Man, it’s been such an exciting week. The support the book has had has just been incredible, and the reviews have been so kind! As it’s a debut novel, and it has taken a few that know me by surprise, so I thought I might put together a little piece about the backstory of ‘The Baby And The Brandy’, and how it came to be. And to begin this, we head back in time 14 years…We begin as I am 16, and I find that, as I am finishing my GCSE’s, that I really enjoy writing. I really fancied writing as an occupation, books being my main hope. My big problem however, was description. I just got so bogged down in it, and let it take over my written word, so much so that my compositions were muddled and uneven, with huge lumbering passages of description.

At this same time, I was really developing a love for cinema, and all things to do with the medium, from the behind the camera creation of scenes to the visual thrill of the finished article itself. I loved it, and I ended up getting interested in screenwriting. This suited me stylistically, as the whole point of screenwriting is to keep description to a minimum! This was such a huge help in whittling away my overly-descriptive urges, and for the next 13 years I concentrated on screenwriting and scripts in earnest.

The first screenwriting project I started on at 16 was Jurassic Park 3. Now, this was in 1999 way before the actual Jurassic Park 3 that came out in 2001! They ended up rather different, hilariously so. In my Jurassic Park 3, we opened at night, in a dark train station, as Jean-Claude Van Damme tried to protect his wife from a harrowing murderous sexual assault, and ended up being framed for her murder in the process. He is then tried and convicted, and despatched off to San Diego Penitentiary, which just so happens to be Isla Nublar, where the events of Jurassic Park took place. Turns out, the authorities didn’t know what to do with Jurassic Park, nor the overflowing prison population, so they re-evaluated capital punishment and decided to kill two birds with one stone. So Van Damme was sent there.

What follows was an extremely poorly written survival tale, and culminated in Van Damme strapping raptor claws to his hands and taking on dinosaurs in hand to hand combat, while somehow proving his innocence and being airlifted out of there to freedom and apologies from the courts. It was a complete mess, but I had a ball. At 16, this was exactly the kind of thing that appealed to me. Jean-Claude Van Damme movies and dinosaurs.

As I hit 18, I started work on two new projects, having cut my teeth on my Jurassic Park 3, and these were ‘The Other Side’ and ‘Murder In The Name’. ‘The Other Side’ was an alien abduction piece in small town america, and really was used as a cathartic tool by myself to examine and expunge the emotional rigours of being an 18 year old boy/man, as I was out into the world good and proper for the first time.

It was deeply poor. I mean really, really bad. It made no sense. It was overly long. And at the end it involved our protagonist driving a Wrangler Jeep along the halls of a downed UFO, mowing down little grey aliens as he drove. Nonsense. But it was more foundation work for future projects than anything.

My third project was ‘Murder In The Name’ a gangster thriller set in Manchester, about a young man called Jack Brooker who finds out his father is actually a gangster. And if you’ve read ‘The Baby And The Brandy’ you’ll realise that that rings a bell. The story was very linear, told from Jack’s point of view, as he darted across Manchester trying to find out who killed his dad. It featured ‘The Floating Far East’, all the main characters of ‘The Baby And The Brandy’, including the legend of ‘The Baby And The Brandy’ itself, and also SPOILER ALERT all the main action beats, including the ending with the jet skis and Manchester airport. Certain things have barely changed at all.

This was 2001, and in the intervening years I had rewritten it, polished it, pulled it apart, reanimated it so many times. I renamed it ‘The Baby And The Brandy’ in 2005 or so. And it was always very poorly realised and generic – a bargain basement gangster film that had no real redeeming features and nothing really to recommend it. I shelved it, and spent the next few years on other projects.

In 2013 I started writing again, once more out of catharsis. I was falling out of love with my media business, and the stresses of running a business in an extremely competitive market place were so dominant, so I started writing prose again out of escapism. I found myself really enjoying it, and learned that I had never really left it behind. I started writing about an ex-military man who was in a disillusioned mire, hating the society he had sacrificed everything to protect. And this became the Ben Bracken: Origins stories.

I released five Origins stories on Amazon Kindle, which I enjoyed greatly, and I always felt that there was room for a full Bracken adventure. I was looking for a Manchester set crime caper to be the basis for the first full Bracken novel, and then I remembered ‘The Baby And The Brandy’ on my shelf.

In a sense, it felt like a match made in heaven. As a solitary piece, ‘The Baby And The Brandy’ was missing so much, and throwing Ben Bracken into that world was exactly what was needed. Alternatively, it gave Ben Bracken a problem he wanted to fix, in the city he finds himself in at the end of the Origins stories. It was all perfect, and so I inserted Ben into my old script.

I loved it immediately. It took the leash off what I wanted to do in the first place back in 2001, and gave Ben Bracken his first true adventure.

I had knee surgery in November 2013, and saw it as no time like the present to head into this in a big way, so I wrote 2,500 words every day for six weeks, while my legs healed. I then spent a couple of weeks rewriting, rejigging, fleshing things out, polishing, in time for the self-imposed January 20th 2014 release date. And what follows has been one of the most fulfilling weeks of my life.

Thank you all very much. I’m now picking up my pen again to write ‘Apex’, the next Ben Bracken adventure, and I hope to follow on strong. And I still think Jean-Clause Van Damme could beat a T-Rex in a fist fight.